


Personal notes (11) suspicion

by longhairshortfuse



Series: Carlos's Secret Diary [11]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Betrayal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 12:51:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1688996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longhairshortfuse/pseuds/longhairshortfuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos starts to work out who can and can't be trusted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Personal notes (11) suspicion

I woke up with the same headache I've had for over a week now. Ell is looking after me. She said I must have had an accident in the lab, maybe some kind of explosion. I can't remember anything about it. She brought some antiseptic for the scalp burns and did what she could with the bruising on my ribs. A couple of the other postgrads apparently caught the edges of the explosion but are fine now and back at work. I've only been downstairs a couple of times this week. I kept calling two of the postgrads by the wrong names. When Ell asked me who Priya and Chris were, I had no answer.

They are people from my dream. My dream of a delicate-looking hard-as-nails dark-haired biochemist with kind eyes and military training. An electrical engineer with a lopsided grin and a fingernail habit. I will not tell Ell about my dream in which Priya and Chris die horribly every night.

There is another outsider in town. He is no more unusual than most of the locals but he goes out to dig in the desert at night and doesn't respect local customs such as the various forbidden areas in town. I asked Gio to find out what he is doing out there. He reported back to me a couple of days later to say that he overheard the man claim to be a marooned time traveler from the future who has saved Night Vale but now can't return home to his own time. We discussed the possibility that having come from the future and changed his past, our present, his original future no longer exists. Gio was keen to learn more about time travel but his physics is a bit too sketchy. He needs to learn a lot of background field theory, quantum mechanics and relativity before he would be able to make any sense of it. His enthusiasm almost prompted me to show him my old notes which are hidden away safely. But something held me back, a sudden return of the headache and visions of little silver particles dissolving skin and screaming that stopped abruptly with a bang. 

I hoped I could talk to the traveler but Cecil reported that he vanished along with his truck, his newspaper photograph erased. 

I am building up suspicions about Ell, and that feels so wrong. She has supported me through so much, from bad break-ups to my mistake with my prototype time manipulator. Whatever the disaster she is there but somehow unaffected and I see circumstantial evidence against her when I look for it. Is this a form of paranoia? At a recent press conference the Mayor disappeared in a puff of green smoke. That used to be one of Ell's favourite party tricks, she spent months perfecting it, borrowing chemicals and glassware, practicing to get just the right recipe for a non-toxic dramatic disappearance. I mentioned it to her, "Oh look, the Mayor stole your trick!" but she just shrugged and said that it was a common enough prank. But I don't know anyone else who has pulled it off. 

At the Mayor's press conference a few journalists were arrested and taken away. I was glad when Cecil's radio show started and gave me confirmation that he was not one of them. I was so relieved that I almost, but not quite, texted him to see if he was busy this Superday. 

 

_I thought you were acting evasive. It's my fault. You were so... so utterly broken after Valentine's day that I ordered your re-education so that you could forget. But the memory was too vivid for the light-touch approach that worked last time and I had to ask them to stop before your brain was damaged beyond recovery. I truly meant no harm. But you know things about time that you are not yet aware of. I still need your notebooks so that we can work out the details but they are not in the apartment. Did you give them to Cecil for safekeeping? We have our own prototype to test very soon, based on what I remember of your department's weekly reports and I would feel safer if you were here._


End file.
